Is sex necessary?

In speaking of the weaker sex in this book, the authors usually confine themselves to the generalization “Woman,” “women,” and “the female.” For the larger discussions of sex, these comprehensive terms suffice. Yet no examination of the pitiable problem of Man and Woman would be complete without some effort to define a few of the more important types of the female. One cannot say, “Oh, well, you know how women are,” and let it go at that. Many truths apply, and many foibles are common, to the whole sex, but the varieties of the female of the species are as manifold as the varieties of the flower called the cineraria.

Successfully to deal with a woman, a man must know what type she is. There have been several methods of classification, none of which I hold thoroughly satisfactory, neither the glandular categories—the gonoid, thyroid, etc.—nor the astrological—Sagittarius, Virgo, Pisces, and so on. One must be pretty expert to tell a good gonoid when he sees one. Personally, I know but very little about them, nor if I had a vast knowledge would I know what to do with it. It is even more difficult, and just as unimportant, to arrive at a zodiacal classification, because that is altogether dependent upon determining the year the woman was born, and because, even if you should ascertain her date of birth, the pish-tosh of analysis and prediction which derives therefrom is a lot of mediæval guesswork. Or so it seems to me, and to Zaner, Blifil, Gorley, Peschkar, Rittenhouse, and Matthiessen.

Of much greater importance is a classification of females by actions. It comes out finally, the nature of a woman, in what she does—her little bag of tricks, as one might say.

A type of which one hears a great deal but which has never been very ably or scientifically analyzed, for the guidance of men, is the Quiet Type. How often one hears the warning, “Look out for the Quiet Type.” Let us see if we should look out for it, and why.

The element of menace in the Quiet Type is commonly considered very great. Yet if one asks a man who professes knowledge of the type, why one should look out for it, one gets but a vague answer. “Just look out, that’s all,” he usually says. When I began my researches I was, in spite of myself, somewhat inhibited by an involuntary subscription to this legendary fear. I found it difficult to fight off a baseless alarm in the presence of a lady of subdued manner. Believing, however, that the best defense is an offense, I determined to carry the war, as it were, into the enemy’s country. The first Quiet Type, or Q.T., that I isolated was a young woman whom I encountered at a Sunday tea party. She sat a little apart from the rest of the group in a great glazed chintz, I believe it was, chair. Her hands rested quietly on the chair arms. She kept her chin rather down than up, and had a way of lifting her gaze slowly, without disturbing the set of her chin. She moved but twice, once to put by a cup of tea and once to push back a stray lock from her forehead. I stole glances at her from time to time, trying to make them appear ingenuous and friendly rather than bold or suggestive, an achievement rendered somewhat troublesome by an unfortunate involuntary winking of the left eyelid to which I am unhappily subject.

I noted that her eyes, which were brown, had a demure light in them. She was dressed simply and was quite pretty. She spoke but once or twice, and then only when spoken to. In a chance shifting of the guests to an adjacent room to examine, I believe, some water colors, I was left quite alone with her. Steeling myself for an ordeal to which I am unused—or was at the time—I moved directly to her side and grasped her hand. “Hallo, baby! Some fun—hah?” I said—a method of attack which I had devised in advance. She was obviously shocked, and instantly rose from her chair and followed the others into the next room. I never saw her again, nor have I been invited to that little home since. Now for some conclusions.

Patently, this particular Q.T., probably due to an individual variation, was not immediately dangerous in the sense that she would seize an opportunity, such as I offered her, to break up the home of, or at least commit some indiscretion with, a man who was obviously—I believe I may say—a dependable family man with the average offhand attractions. Dr. White has criticized my methodology in this particular case, a criticism which I may say now, in all good humor, since the danger is past, once threatened to interpose insuperable obstacles, of a temperamental nature, in the way of this collaboration. It was his feeling that I might just as well have removed one of the type’s shoes as approach her the way I did. I cannot hold with him there. Neither, I am gratified to say, can Zaner, but in fairness to White it is only just to add that Tithridge can.

However, the next Q.T. that I encountered I placed under observation more gradually. I used to see her riding on a Fifth Avenue bus, always at a certain hour. I took to riding on this bus also, and discreetly managed to sit next her on several occasions. She eventually noticed that I appeared to be cultivating her and eyed me quite candidly, with a look I could not at once decipher. I could now, but at that time I couldn’t. I resolved to put the matter to her quite frankly, to tell her, in fine, that I was studying her type and that I wished to place her under closer observation. Therefore, one evening, I doffed my hat and began.

“Madam,” I said, “I would greatly appreciate making a leisurely examination of you, at your convenience.” She struck me with the palm of her open hand, got up from her seat, and descended at the next even-numbered street—Thirty-sixth, I believe it was.

I may as well admit here and now that personally I enjoyed at no time any great success with Q.T’s. I think one may go as far as to say that any scientific examination of the Quiet Type, as such, is out of the question. I know of no psychologist who has ever got one alone long enough to get anywhere. (Tithridge has averred that he began too late in life; Zaner that he does not concur in the major premise.) The Quiet Type is not amenable to the advances of scientific men when the advances are of a scientific nature, and also when they are of any other nature. Indeed, it is one of the unfortunate handicaps to psychological experimentation that many types of women do not lend themselves readily to purposeful study. As one woman said to me, “It all seems so mapped out, kind of.”

I am a little reluctant to report one other adventure with the Quiet Type, and that is why I seem to have summed up in the preceding paragraph without mentioning it. However, I now feel that some brief outline of the case I have alluded to should be set down here—especially after all this allusion. This young lady was a guest at a week-end party where I was also a guest. On Saturday evening it began to appear, quite early, that there was going to be considerable drinking. And, to be sure, there was. Among those who became, as the fellow said, a little bit uncertain of themselves, were the young Q.T. and myself. It was, in all truth, largely her fault that I reached a state of abandon from which, at her further solicitation, it was but an easy step to a feeling of sheer devil-may-care. This condition, it is perhaps unnecessary to say, militates against that fine precision of mind so essential to the best results in any scientific investigation.

I do not remember all that ensued one-half so clearly as I should like to. I have often thought deeply on the matter, striving to reconstruct the complete scene, as it were, but my efforts have been hampered by the lamentable fact that I found dwelling upon the more easily remembered scenes so delightful that I simply dwelt on them. I remember, for example, that I was at the piano, or more exactly, on it—standing on it. The Quiet Type, fearing that I might fall, grasped me firmly about the knees, and I did fall. I was not only uninjured, but I got to my feet laughing. At this she began to laugh. I had lost my glasses in the fall, and began hunting for them. In bending over, however, I was assailed by a slight touch of vertigo, which runs in my family, and fell again.

The next that I remember is sitting on the edge of a cliff, or falaise, as the French call it, looking out over a lake. The young lady was beside me. “Well,” she said, “what shall we do next?” I asked her how I had reached the cliff—if I had walked there. “Partly,” she said. This set me to thinking. “I have lost my glasses,” I said, and began hunting for them again. She again seized me by the knees, and I fell. In falling, both of us became enormously involved. I instantly arose and was about to step into the lake, when she grasped me around the waist. We both sat down. “You have gone as far as you can,” she said, and tittered. “I should like to go a little farther,” said I. She arose. “You’re a funny man,” she said, and laughed again. I grasped her, much to my surprise, by one ankle, and she began to topple toward the lake. I fell heavily backward, pulling her with me, and this doubtless saved her life. “You must be more careful,” I told her. We sat up. “Don’t you think you better take me home?” she said, in a singular voice—low and odd. “Rather,” I responded, and arose. I took her back to the house, which was some half-mile distant, we joined the others, and that is all I remember.

I shall always regret, of course, that I did not have full possession of my faculties during the walk to the cliff’s edge, for there might have been, in the ten or fifteen minutes it must have taken, an excellent opportunity to “get at” the young woman. There is nothing quite so provocative of pleasant, revelatory talk as a quiet walk with some one at night. However, the episode ended as I have said, and a golden opportunity was lost.

In my very failures I made, I believe, certain significant findings in regard to the Quiet Type. It is not dangerous to men, but to a particular man. Apparently it lies in wait for some one individual and gets him. Being got by this special type, or even being laid in wait for, would seem to me in some cases not without its pleasurable compensations. Wherein, exactly, the menace lies, I have no means of knowing. I have my moments when I think I see what it is, but I have other moments when I think I don’t.

The Buttonhole-twister Type is much easier to come at. A girl of this persuasion works quite openly. She has the curious habit of insinuating a finger, usually the little finger of the right hand, unless she be left-handed, into the lapel buttonhole of a gentleman, and twisting it. Usually, she picks out a man who is taller than herself and usually she gets him quite publicly, in parks, on street corners, and the like. Often, while twisting, she will place the toe of her right shoe on the ground, with the heel elevated, and will swing the heel slowly through an arc of about thirty or thirty-five degrees, back and forth. This manifestation is generally accompanied by a wistful, far-away look on the woman’s face, and she but rarely gazes straight at the man. She invariably goes in for negative statements during the course of her small writhings, such as “It is not,” “I am not,” “I don’t believe you do,” and the like. This type is demonstrative in her affections and never lies in wait with any subtlety. She is likely to be restless and discontented with the married state, largely because she will want to go somewhere that her husband does not want to go, or will not believe he has been to the places that he says he just came from. It is well to avoid this type.

A charming but altogether dangerous type is the “Don’t, dear” Type. By assuming a middle of the road, this way and that way, attitude toward a gentleman’s advances, she will at once allure and repulse him. The man will thus be twice allured. He calls on her, and they sit in the porch swing, let us say. When he slips his arm around her, she will say in a low tone, “Don’t, dear.” No matter what he does, she will say, “Don’t, dear.” This type is a homemaker. Unless the man wants a home made for him within a very short time, it is better for him to observe the “don’t” rather than the “dear,” and depart. The type is common in the Middle West, particularly in university towns, or was some few years ago, at any rate. Any effort to classify modern university types would be difficult and confusing. They change from year to year, and vary with the region. I am told that one type has actually been known to get the man of her choice down and sit, as it were, side-saddle of him. I would not give even this brief mention, in passing, to college types of the female, were they not important because they so frequently divert a man from his career and tie him down before he has a chance to begin working, or even to say anything.

The rest of the types of American women, such as the Outdoors, the Clinging Vine, and so on and so on, are too generally known to need any special comment here. If a man does not know one when he sees it, or cannot tell one from another, of these more common types, there is little that can be done for him. No man should contemplate marriage, or even mingle with women, unless he has a certain measure of intuition about these more obvious types. For example, if a man could not tell instantly that a woman was the sort that would keep him playing tennis, or riding horseback, all afternoon, and then expect him to ride back and forth all night on the ferry, no amount of description of the Outdoors Type would be of any avail.

There is, however, one phenomenal modern type, a product of these strange post-war years, which will bear a brief analysis. This is the type represented by the girl who gets right down to a discussion of sex on the occasion of her first meeting with a man, but then goes on to betray a great deal of alarm and aversion to the married state. This is the “I-can’t-go-through-with-it” Type. Many American virgins fall within this classification. Likewise it contains women who have had some strange and bitter experience about which they do a great deal of hinting but which they never clearly explain. If involved with, or even merely presented to, a woman of this type, no man in his right mind will do anything except reach for his hat. Science does not know what is the matter with these women, or whether anything is the matter. A lot of reasons have been advanced for girls acting in this incredible, dismayed manner—eleven reasons in all, I believe—but no one really knows very much about it. It may be their mothers’ teaching, it may have been some early childhood experience, such as getting caught under a gate, or suffering a severe jolting up by being let fall when a boy jumped off the other end of a teeter-totter, or it may simply be a whim. We do not know. One thing is sure, they are never the Quiet Type. They talk your arm off.